This chapter will introduce you to frameworks in general and later specifically to CFWheels. We'll help you decide if you even need a framework at all and what common problems a framework tries to solve. If we're able to convince you that using a framework is the right thing for you, then we'll present our goals with creating CFWheels and show you some key CFWheels concepts.

So let's get started.

Do I Really Need to Use a Framework?

Short answer, no. If you don't mind doing the same thing over and over again and are getting paid by the hour to do so, then by all means keep doing that.

Slightly longer answer, no. If you're working on a highly customized project that does not fall within what 9 out of 10 web sites/applications normally do then you likely need a high percentage of custom code, and a framework will not help much.

However, if you're like most of us and have noticed that for every new project you start on--or even every new feature you add to an existing project--you waste a lot of time re-creating the wheel, then you should read on because CFWheels may just be the solution for you!

CFWheels will make starting a new project or building a new feature quick and painless. You can get straight to solving business problems on day one! To understand how this is achieved, we figured that a little background info on frameworks in general may help you out.

All good frameworks rise from the need to solve real problems in real world situations. CFWheels is based heavily on the Rails framework for Ruby and also gets inspiration from Django and, though to a lesser extent, other frameworks in the ColdFusion space (like Fusebox, for example). Over the years the contributors to these frameworks have identified problems and tedious tasks in their own development processes, built a solution for it, and abstracted (made it more generic so it suits any project) the solution into the framework in question. Piggy-backing on what all these great programmers have already created and adding a few nice solutions of our own, CFWheels stands on solid ground.

OK, so that was the high level overview of what frameworks are meant to do. But let's get a little more specific.

Framework Goals in General

Most web development frameworks set out to address some or all of these common concerns:

• Map incoming requests to the code that handles them.

• Separate your business logic from your presentation code.

• Let you work at a higher level of abstraction, thus making you work faster.

• Give you a good code organization structure to follow.

• Encourage clean and pragmatic design.

• Simplify saving data to a storage layer.

Like all other good frameworks, CFWheels does all this. But there are some subtle differences, and certain things are more important in CFWheels than in other frameworks and vice versa. Let's have a look at the specific goals with CFWheels so you can see how it relates to the overall goals of frameworks in general.

Our Goals With CFWheels

As we've said before, CFWheels is heavily based on Ruby on Rails, but it's not a direct port, and there are some things that have been changed to better fit the CFML language. Here's a brief overview of the goals we're striving for with CFWheels (most of these will be covered in greater detail in later chapters):

Simplicity

We strive for simplicity on a lot of different levels in CFWheels. We'll gladly trade code beauty in the framework's internal code for simplicity for the developers who will use it. This goal to keep things simple is evident in a lot of different areas in CFWheels. Here are some of the most notable ones:

• The concept of object oriented programming is very simple and data-centric in CFWheels, rather than 100% "pure" at all times.

• By default, you'll always get a query result set back when dealing with multiple records in CFWheels, simply because that is the way we're all used to outputting data.

• CFWheels encourages best practices, but it will never give you an error if you go against any of them.

• With CFWheels, you won't program yourself into a corner. If worse comes to worse, you can always drop right out of the framework and go back to old school code for a while if necessary.

• Good old CFML code is used for everything, so there is no need to mess with XML for example.

What this means is that you don't have to be a fantastic programmer to use the framework (although it doesn't hurt). It's enough if you're an average programmer. After using CFWheels for a while, you'll probably find that you've become a better programmer though!

Documentation

If you've ever downloaded a piece of open source software, then you know that most projects lack documentation. CFWheels hopes to change that. We're hoping that by putting together complete, up-to-date documentation that this framework will appeal, and be usable, by everyone. Even someone who has little ColdFusion programming background, let alone experience with frameworks.

Key Wheels Concepts

Besides what is already mentioned above, there are some key concepts in CFWheels that makes sense to familiarize yourself with early on. If you don't feel that these concepts are to your liking, feel free to look for a different framework or stick to using no framework at all. Too often programmers choose a framework and spend weeks trying to bend it to do what they want to do rather than follow the framework conventions.

Speaking of conventions, this brings us to the first key concept:

Convention Over Configuration

Instead of having to set up tons of configuration variables, CFWheels will just assume you want to do things a certain way by using default settings. In fact, you can start programming a Wheels application without setting any configuration variables at all!

If you find yourself constantly fighting the conventions, then that is a hint that you're not yet ready for CFWheels or CFWheels is not ready for you.

Beautiful Code

Beautiful (for lack of a better word) code is code that you can scan through and immediately see what it's meant to do. It's code that is never repeated anywhere else. And, most of all, it's code that you'll enjoy writing and will enjoy coming back to 6 months from now.

Sometimes the CFWheels structure itself encourages beautiful code (separating business logic from request handling, for example). Sometimes it's just something that comes naturally after reading documentation, viewing other CFWheels applications, and talking to other CFWheels developers.

Model-View-Controller (MVC)

If you've investigated frameworks in the past, then you've probably heard this terminology before. Model-View-Controller, or MVC, is a way to structure your code so that it is broken down into three easy-to-manage pieces:

• Model: Just another name for the representation of data, usually a database table.

• View: What the user or their browser sees and interacts with (a web page in most cases).

• Controller: The behind-the-scenes guy that's coordinating everything.

"Uh, yeah. So what's this got to do with anything?" you may ask. MVC is how CFWheels structures your code for you. As you start working with CFWheels applications, you'll see that most of the code you write (database queries, forms, and data manipulation) are very nicely separated into one of these three categories.

The benefits of MVC are limitless, but one of the major ones is that you almost always know right where to go when something needs to change.

If you've added a column to the vehicles table in your database and need to give the user the ability to edit that field, all you need to change is your View. That's where the form is presented to the user for editing.

If you find yourself constantly getting a list of all the red cars in your inventory, you can add a new method to your model called getRedCars() that does all the work for you. Then when you want that list, just add a call to that method in your controller and you've got 'em!

Object Relational Mapping (ORM)

The Object Relational Mapping, or ORM, in CFWheels is perhaps the one thing that could potentially speed up your development the most. An ORM handles mapping objects in memory to how they are stored in the database. It can replace a lot of your query writing with simple methods such as user.save(), blogPost.comments(order="date"), and so on. We'll talk a lot more about the ORM in CFWheels in the chapters about models.

There's Your Explanation

So there you have it, a completely fair and unbiased introduction to CFWheels. ;)

If you've been developing ColdFusion applications for a while, then we know this all seems hard to believe. But trust us; it works. And if you're new to ColdFusion or even web development in general, then you probably aren't aware of most of the pains that Wheels was meant to alleviate!

That's okay. You're welcome in the CFWheels camp just the same.

CFWheels's built in model provides your application with some simple and powerful functionality for interacting with databases. To get started, you will make some simple configurations, call some functions within your controllers, and that's it. Best yet, you will rarely ever need to write SQL code to get those redundant CRUD tasks out of the way.

Our Sample Application: User Management

We'll learn by building part of a sample user management application. This tutorial will teach you the basics of setting up a resource that interacts with the CFWheels ORM.

Setting up the Data Source

By default, CFWheels will connect to a data source that has the same name as the folder containing your application. So if your application is in a folder called C:\websites\mysite\blog\, then it will connect to a data source named blog.

To change this default behavior, open the file at config/settings.cfm. In a fresh install of CFWheels, you'll see some commented-out lines of code that read as such:

<cfscript>
    // Use this file to configure your application.
    // You can also use the environment specific files (e.g. /config/production/settings.cfm) to override settings set here.
    // Don't forget to issue a reload request (e.g. reload=true) after making changes.
    // See http://docs.cfwheels.org/docs/configuration-and-defaults for more info.
    // If you leave the settings below commented out, CFWheels will set the data source name to the same name as the folder the application resides in.
    // set(dataSourceName="");
    // set(dataSourceUserName="");
    // set(dataSourcePassword="");
</cfscript>

Uncomment the lines that tell CFWheels what it needs to know about the data source and provide the appropriate values. This may include values for dataSourceName, dataSourceUserName, and dataSourcePassword.

set(dataSourceName="back2thefuture");
// set(dataSourceUserName="marty");
// set(dataSourcePassword="mcfly");

Our Sample Data Structure

CFWheels supports MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and H2. It doesn't matter which DBMS you use for this tutorial; we will all be writing the same CFML code to interact with the database. CFWheels does everything behind the scenes that needs to be done to work with each DBMS.

That said, here's a quick look at a table that you'll need in your database, named users:

Note a couple things about this users table:

1. The table name is plural.

2. The table has an auto-incrementing primary key named id.

Fortunately, there are ways of going outside of these conventions when you really need it. But let's learn the conventional way first. Sometimes you need to learn the rules before you can know how to break them.

Creating Routes for the users Resource

Next, open the file at config/routes.cfm. You will see contents similar to this:

mapper()
    .wildcard()
    .root(to="wheels##wheels", method="get")
.end();

We are going to create a section of our application for listing, creating, updating, and deleting user records. In CFWheels routing, this requires a plural resource, which we'll name users.

Because a users resource is more specific than the "generic" routes provided by CFWheels, we'll list it first in the chain of mapper method calls:

mapper()
    .resources("users")
    .wildcard()
    .root(to="wheels##wheels", method="get")
.end();

This will create URL endpoints for creating, reading, updating, and deleting user records:

• Name is referenced in your code to tell CFWheels where to point forms and links.

• Method is the HTTP verb that CFWheels listens for to match up the request.

• URL Path is the URL that CFWheels listens for to match up the request.

Creating Users

First, let's create a simple form for adding a new user to the users table. To do this, we will use CFWheels's form helper functions. CFWheels includes a whole range of functions that simplifies all of the tasks that you need to display forms and communicate errors to the user.

Creating the Form

Now create a new file in views/users called new.cfm. This will contain the view code for our simple form.

Next, add these lines of code to the new file:

<cfoutput>

<h1>New User</h1>

#startFormTag(route="users")#
    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="name", label="Name")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="email", label="Email")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #passwordField(
            objectName="user",
            property="password",
            label="Password"
        )#
    </div>

    <div>#submitTag()#</div>
#endFormTag()#

</cfoutput>

Form Helpers

What we've done here is use form helpers to generate all of the form fields necessary for creating a new user in our database. It may feel a little strange using functions to generate form elements, but it will soon become clear why we're doing this. Trust us on this one… you'll love it!

Supplying the Form with Data

All of the form helper calls in our view specify an objectName argument with a reference to a variable named user. That means that we need to supply our view code with an object called user. Because the controller is responsible for providing the views with data, we'll set it there.

Create a new ColdFusion component at controllers/Users.cfc.

component extends="Controller" {
    function config(){}

    function new() {
        user = model("user").new();
    }
}

CFWheels will automatically know that we're talking about the users database table when we instantiate a usermodel. The convention: database tables are plural and their corresponding CFWheels models are singular.

Why is our model name singular instead of plural? When we're talking about a single record in the users database, we represent that with an individual model object. So the users table contains many user objects. It just works better in conversation.

The Generated Form

Now when we run the URL at http://localhost/users/new, we'll see the form with the fields that we defined.

The HTML generated by your application will look something like this:

<h1>New User</h1>

<form action="/users" method="post">
    <div>
        <label for="user-name">
            Name
            <input id="user-name" type="text" value="" name="user&#x5b;name&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-email">
            Email
            <input id="user-email" type="text" value="" name="user&#x5b;email&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-password">
            Password
            <input id="user-password" type="password" value="" name="user&#x5b;password&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div><input value="Save&#x20;changes" type="submit"></div>
</form>

So far we have a fairly well-formed, accessible form, without writing a bunch of repetitive markup.

Handling the Form Submission

Next, we'll code the create action in the controller to handle the form submission and save the new user to the database.

function create() {
    user = model("user").create(params.user);

    redirectTo(
        route="users",
        success="User created successfully."
    );
}

Because we used the objectName argument in the fields of our form, we can access the user data as a struct in the params struct.

There are more things that we can do in the create action to handle validation, but let's keep it simple in this tutorial.

Listing Users

First, let's get the data that the listing needs. Create an action named index in the users controller like so:

function index() {
    users = model("user").findAll(order="name");
}

In the view at views/users/index.cfm, it's as simple as looping through the query and outputting the data

<cfoutput>

<h1>Users</h1>

<p>#linkTo(text="New User", route="newUser")#</p>

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <th>Email</th>
            <th colspan="2"></th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <cfloop query="users">
            <tr>
                <td>
                    #EncodeForHtml(users.name)#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #EncodeForHtml(users.email)#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #linkTo(
                        text="Edit",
                        route="editUser",
                        key=users.id,
                        title="Edit #users.name#"
                    )#
                </td>
                <td>
                    #buttonTo(
                        text="Delete",
                        route="user",
                        key=users.id,
                        method="delete",
                        title="Delete #users.name#"
                    )#
                </td>
            </tr>
        </cfloop>
    </tbody>
</table>

</cfoutput>

Editing Users

We'll now show another cool aspect of form helpers by creating a screen for editing users.

Coding the Edit Form

You probably noticed in the code listed above that we'll have an action for editing a single users record. We used the linkTo() form helper function to add an "Edit" button to the form. This action expects a key as well.

Because in the linkTo() form helper function we specified the parameter key, Wheels adds this parameter into the URL when generating the route.

Wheels will automatically add the provided 'key' from the URL to the params struct in the controllers edit() function.

Given the provided key, we'll have the action load the appropriate user object to pass on to the view:

function edit() {
    user = model("user").findByKey(params.key);
}

The view at views/user/edit.cfm looks almost exactly the same as the view for creating a user:

<cfoutput>

<h1>Edit User #EncodeForHtml(user.name)#</h1>

#startFormTag(route="user", key=user.key(), method="patch")#
    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="name", label="Name")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #textField(objectName="user", property="email", label="Email")#
    </div>

    <div>
        #passwordField(
            objectName="user",
            property="password",
            label="Password"
        )#
    </div>

    <div>#submitTag()#</div>
#endFormTag()#

</cfoutput>

But an interesting thing happens. Because the form fields are bound to the user object via the form helpers' objectName arguments, the form will automatically provide default values based on the object's properties.

With the user model populated, we'll end up seeing code similar to this:

<h1>Edit User Homer Simpson</h1>

<form action="/users/1" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="patch">

    <div>
        <input type="hidden" name="user&#x5b;id&#x5d;" value="15">
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-name">
            Name
            <input
                id="user-name"
                type="text"
                value="Homer Simpson"
                name="user&#x5b;name&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-email">
            Email
            <input
                id="user-email"
                type="text"
                value="homerj@nuclearpower.com"
                name="user&#x5b;email&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div>
        <label for="user-password">
            Password
            <input
                id="user-password"
                type="password"
                value="donuts.mmm"
                name="user&#x5b;password&#x5d;">
        </label>
    </div>

    <div><input value="Save&#x20;changes" type="submit"></div>
</form>

Pretty cool, huh?

Opportunities for Refactoring

There's a lot of repetition in the new and edit forms. You'd imagine that we could factor out most of this code into a single view file. To keep this tutorial from becoming a book, we'll just continue on knowing that this could be better.

Handing the Edit Form Submission

Now we'll create the update action. This will be similar to the create action, except it will be updating the user object:

function update() {
    user = model("user").findByKey(params.key);
    user.update(params.user);

    redirectTo(
        route="editUser",
        key=user.id,
        success="User updated successfully."
    );
}

Deleting Users

Notice in our listing above that we have a delete action. Here's what it would look like:

function delete() {
    user = model("user").findByKey(params.key);
    user.delete();

    redirectTo(
        route="users",
        success="User deleted successfully."
    );
}

Database Says Hello

We've shown you quite a few of the basics in getting a simple user database up and running. We hope that this has whet your appetite to see some of the power packed into the CFWheels framework. There's plenty more.

Be sure to read on to some of the related chapters listed below to learn more about working with CFWheels's ORM.

One module that we have created is a module that extends CommandBox itself with commands and features specific to the CFWheels framework. The CFWheels CLI module for CommandBox is modeled after the Ruby on Rails CLI module and gives similar capabilities to the CFWheels developer.

Install CommandBox

Once installed, you can either double-click on the box executable which opens the CommandBox shell window, or run box from a CMD window in Windows, Terminal window in MacOS, or shell prompt on a Linux server. Sometimes you only want to call a single CommandBox command and don't need to launch a whole CommandBox shell window to do that, for these instances you can call the CommandBox command directly from your default system terminal window by prefixing the command with the box prefix.

So to run the CommandBox version command you could run box version from the shell or you could launch the CommandBox shell and run version inside it.

This is a good concept to grasp, cause depending on your workflow, you may find it easier to do one versus the other. Most of the commands you will see in these CLI guides will assume that you are entering the command in the actual CommandBox shell so the box prefix is left off.

Install the cfwheels-cli CommandBox Module

Okay, now that we have CommandBox installed, let's add the CFWheels CLI module.

Installing this module will add a number of commands to your default CommandBox installation. All of these commands are prefixed by the wheels name space. There are commands to create a brand new CFWheels application or scaffold out sections of your application. We'll see some of these commands in action momentarily.

Start a new Application

Now that we have CommandBox installed and extended it with the CFWheels CLI module, let's start our first CFWheels app from the command line. We'll look at the simplest method for creating a CFWheels app and starting our development server.

A few minutes after submitting the above commands a new browser window should open up and display the default CFWheels congratulations screen.

So what just happened? Since we only passed the application name myApp to the wheels generate app command, it used default values for most of its parameters and downloaded our Base template (cfwheels-base-template) from ForgeBox.io, then downloaded the framework core files (cfwheels) from ForgeBox.io and placed it in the wheels directory, then configured the application name and reload password, and started a Lucee server on a random port.

This getting started guide has taken you from the very beginning and gotten you to the point where you can go into any empty directory on your local development machine and start a CFWheels project by issuing a couple of CLI commands. In later guides we'll explore these options further and see what else the CLI can do for us.

Starting a local development server

With CommandBox, we don't need to have Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion installed locally. With a simple command, we can make CommandBox go and get the CFML engine we've requested, and quickly create a server running on Undertow. Make sure you're in the root of your website, and then run:

The server will then start on a random port on 127.0.0.1 and will create a server.json file in your webroot. We can add various options to server.json to customize our server. Here's an example:

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    }
}

In this example, I've set the server name to myApp, meaning I can now start the server from any directory by simply calling start myApp. I've also specified a specific port, 60000, but you can specify any port you want, or just remove that to start on a random port each time. Lastly, I've enabled URL rewriting, and pointing the URL rewrite configuration file to the urlrewrite.xml which is included in CFWheels 2.x. (If you've used the wheels new command to create your app, this will already be done for you).

Using custom host names

Controlling local servers

Obviously, anything you start, you might want to stop. Servers can be stopped either via right/ctrl clicking on the icon in the taskbar, or by the stop command. To stop a server running in the current directory issue the following:

You can also stop a server from anywhere by using its name:

If you want to see what server configurations exist on your system and their current status, simply do server list

myapp (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60000
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myapp

myAPI (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60010
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myAPI

megasite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:61280
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/megasite

awesomesite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60015
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/awesomeo

To remove a server configuration from the list, you can use server forget myapp. Note the status of the servers on the list are somewhat unreliable, as it only remembers the last known state of the server: so if you start a server and then turn off your local machine, it may still remember it as running when you turn your local machine back on, which is why we recommend the use of force: true in the server.json file.

Specifying different CF engines

By default, CommandBox will run Lucee (version 5.x at time of writing). You may wish to specify an exact version of Lucee, or use Adobe ColdFusion. We can do this via either setting the appropriate cfengine setting in server.json, or at runtime with the cfengine= argument.

Or via server.json

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "host":"localhost",
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    },
    "app":{
        "cfengine":"adobe@2016"
    },
}

You can of course run multiple servers, so if you need to test your app on Lucee 4.x, Lucee 5.x and Adobe 2016, you can just start three servers with different cfengine= arguments!

By default the Lucee server that CommandBox starts has all the basic Lucee extensions that you are going to need installed, but if need to minimize the size of the Lucee instance you launch, then you can use Lucee-Light by specifying cfengine=lucee-light in your server.json file. CFWheels can run just fine on lucee-light (which is after all, Lucee, minus all the extensions) but at a minimum, requires the following extensions to be installed as dependencies in your box.json. Please note you may have to add any drivers you need for your database to this list as well.

"dependencies":{
    "lucee-image":"lex:https://ext.lucee.org/lucee.image.extension-1.0.0.35.lex",
    "lucee-zip": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/compress-extension-1.0.0.2.lex",
    "lucee-esapi": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/esapi-extension-2.1.0.18.lex"
}

Once added to your box.json file, while the server is running, just do box install, which will install the dependencies, and load them into the running server within 60 seconds.

Alternatively you can download the extensions and add them manually to your server root's deploy folder (i.e \WEB-INF\lucee-server\deploy)

Testing Your Install

Okay, so you have CFWheels installed and can see the CFWheels "Congratulations!" page as shown below. That wasn't that hard now, was it?

Hello World: Your First CFWheels App

Okay, let's get to some example code. We know that you've been dying to get your hands on some code!

To continue with Programming Tutorial Tradition, we'll create the ubiquitous Hello World! application. But to keep things interesting, let's add a little CFWheels magic along the way.

Setting up the Controller

Let's create a controller from scratch to illustrate how easy it is to set up a controller and plug it into the CFWheels framework.

First, create a file called Say.cfc in the controllers directory and add the code below to the file.

component extends="Controller"{
}

Congratulations, you just created your first CFWheels controller! What does this controller do, you might ask? Well, to be honest, not much. It has no methods defined, so it doesn't add any new functionality to our application. But because it extends the base Controller component, it inherits quite a bit of powerful functionality and is now tied into our CFWheels application.

The error says "Could not find the view page for the 'index' action in the 'say' controller." Where did "index" come from? The URL we typed in only specified a controller name but no action. When an action is not specified in the URL, CFWheels assumes that we want the default action. Out of the box, the default action in CFWheels is set to index. So in our example, CFWheels tried to find the index action within the say controller, and it threw an error because it couldn't find its view page.

Setting up an Action

But let's jump ahead. Now that we have the controller created, let's add an action to it called hello. Change your say controller so it looks like the code block below:

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
    }
}

As you can see, we created an empty method named hello.

Now let's call our new action in the browser and see what we get. To call the hello action, we simply add /hello to the end of the previous URL that we used to call our say controller:

http://127.0.0.1:60000/say/hello

Once again, we get a ColdFusion error. Although we have created the controller and added the hello action to it, we haven't created the view.

Setting up the View

By default, when an action is called, CFWheels will look for a view file with the same name as the action. It then hands off the processing to the view to display the user interface. In our case, CFWheels tried to find a view file for our say/hello action and couldn't find one.

Let's remedy the situation and create a view file. View files are simple CFML pages that handle the output of our application. In most cases, views will return HTML code to the browser. By default, the view files will have the same name as our controller actions and will be grouped into a directory under the view directory. This new directory will have the same name as our controller.

Find the views directory in the root of your CFWheels installation. There will be a few directories in there already. For now, we need to create a new directory in the views directory called say. This is the same name as the controller that we created above.

Now inside the say directory, create a file called hello.cfm. In the hello.cfm file, add the following line of code:

<h1>Hello World!</h>

Save your hello.cfm file, and let's call our say/hello action once again. You have your first working CFWheels page if your browser looks like Figure 3 below.

You have just created your first functional CFWheels page, albeit it is a very simple one. Pat yourself on the back, go grab a snack, and when you're ready, let's go on and extend the functionality of our Hello World! application a little more.

Adding Dynamic Content to Your View

We will add some simple dynamic content to our hello action and add a second action to the application. We'll then use some CFWheels code to tie the 2 actions together. Let's get get to it!

The Dynamic Content

The first thing we are going to do is to add some dynamic content to our say/hello action. Modify your say controller so it looks like the code block below:

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
        time = Now();
    }
}

All we are doing here is creating a variable called time and setting its value to the current server time using the basic ColdFusion Now() function. When we do this, the variable becomes immediately available to our view code.

Why not just set up this value directly in the view? If you think about it, maybe the logic behind the value of time may eventually change. What if eventually we want to display its value based on the user's time zone? What if later we decide to pull it from a web service instead? Remember, the controller is supposed to coordinate all of the data and business logic, not the view.

Displaying the Dynamic Content

Next, we will modify our say/hello.cfm view file so that it looks like the code block bellow. When we do this, the value will be displayed in the browser.

<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>Current time: <cfoutput>#time#</cfoutput></p>

call your say/hello action again in your browser. Your browser should look like Figure 4 below.

This simple example showed that any dynamic content created in a controller action is available to the corresponding view file. In our application, we created a time variable in the say/hello controller action and display that variable in our say/hello.cfm view file.

Adding a Second Action: Goodbye

Now we will expand the functionality of our application once again by adding a second action to our say controller. If you feel adventurous, go ahead and add a goodbye action to the say controller on your own, then create a goodbye.cfm view file that displays a "Goodbye" message to the user. If you're not feeling that adventurous, we'll quickly go step by step.

First, modify the the say controller file so that it looks like the code block below.

component extends="Controller" {
    function hello() {
        time = Now();
    }

    function goodbye() {
    }
}

Now go to the views/say directory and create a goodbye.cfm page.

Add the following code to the goodbye.cfm page and save it.

Goodbye World!

If we did everything right, we should be able to call the new say/goodbye action using the following URL:

http://127.0.0.1:60000/say/goodbye

Your browser should look like Figure 5 below:

Linking to Other Actions

Now let's link our two actions together. We will do this by adding a link to the bottom of each page so that it calls the other page.

Linking Hello to Goodbye

Open the say/hello.cfm view file. We are going to add a line of code to the end of this file so our say/hello.cfm view file looks like the code block below:

<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>Current time: <cfoutput>#time#</cfoutput></p>
<p>Time to say <cfoutput>#linkTo(text="goodbye", action="goodbye")#?</cfoutput></p>

Once you have added the additional line of code to the end of the say/hello.cfm view file, save your file and call the say/hello action from your browser. Your browser should look like Figure 6 below.

You can see that CFWheels created a link for us and added an appropriate URL for the say/goodbye action to the link.

Linking Goodbye to Hello

Let's complete our little app and add a corresponding link to the bottom of our say/goodbye.cfm view page.

Open your say/goodbye.cfm view page and modify it so it looks like the code block below.

CFML: views/say/goodbye.cfm

<h1>Goodbye World!</h1>
<p>Time to say <cfoutput>#linkTo(text="hello", action="hello")#?</cfoutput></p>

If you now call the say/goodbye action in your browser, your browser should look like Figure 7 below.

Much More to Learn

You now know enough to be dangerous with CFWheels. Look out! But there are many more powerful features to cover. You may have noticed that we haven't even talked about the M in MVC.

No worries. We will get there. And we think you will enjoy it.

Installing CFWheels is so simple that there is barely a need for a chapter devoted to it. But we figured we'd better make one anyway in case anyone is specifically looking for a chapter about installation.

So, here are the simple steps you need to follow to get rolling on CFWheels...

Manual Installation

1. Download CFWheels

You have 2 choices when downloading CFWheels. You can either use the latest official release of CFWheels, or you can take a walk on the wild side and go with the latest committed source code in our Git repository.

In most cases, we recommend going with the official release because it's well documented and has been through a lot of bug testing. Only if you're in desperate need of a feature that has not been released yet would we advise you to go with the version stored in the Git master branch.

Let's assume you have downloaded the latest official release. (Really, you should go with this option.) You now have a .zip file saved somewhere on your computer. On to the next step...

2. Setup the Website

Getting an empty website running with CFWheels installed is an easy process if you already know your way around IIS or Apache. Basically, you need to create a new website in your web server of choice and unzip the contents of the file into the root of it.

• Create a new folder under your web root (usually C:\Inetpub\wwwroot) named wheels_site and unzip the CFWheels .zip file into the root of it.

• Create a new website using IIS called CFWheels Site with localhost as the host header name and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mysite as the path to your home directory.

3. Setup the Database (Optional)

Create a new database in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or H2 and add a new data source for it in the ColdFusion/Lucee Administrator, just as you'd normally do. Now open up config/settings.cfm and call set(dataSourceName="") with the name you chose for the data source.

4. Test It

When you've followed the steps above, you can test your installation by typing http://localhost/ (or whatever you set as the host header name) in your web browser. You should get a page saying "Welcome to CFWheels!"

That's it. You're done. This is where the fun begins!

We can identify 3 different types of requirements that you should be aware of:

• Project Requirements. Is CFWheels a good fit for your project?

• Developer Requirements. Do you have the knowledge and mindset to program effectively in CFWheels?

• System Requirements. Is your server ready for CFWheels?

Project Requirements

Before you start learning CFWheels and making sure all the necessary software is installed on your computer, you really need to take a moment and think about the project you intend to use CFWheels on. Is it a ten page website that won't be updated very often? Is it a space flight simulator program for NASA? Is it something in between?

Most websites are, at their cores, simple data manipulation applications. You fetch a row, make some updates to it, stick it back in the database and so on. This is the "target market" for CFWheels--simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) website applications.

A simple ten page website won't do much data manipulation, so you don't need CFWheels for that (or even ColdFusion in some cases). A flight simulator program will do so much more than simple CRUD work, so in that case, CFWheels is a poor match for you (and so perhaps, is ColdFusion).

If your website falls somewhere in between these two extreme examples, then read on. If not, go look for another programming language and framework. ;)

Another thing worth noting right off the bat (and one that ties in with the simple CRUD reasoning above) is that CFWheels takes a very data-centric approach to the development process. What we mean by that is that it should be possible to visualize and implement the database design early on in the project's life cycle. So, if you're about to embark on a project with an extensive period of object oriented analysis and design which, as a last step almost, looks at how to persist objects, then you should probably also look for another framework.

Still reading?

Good!

Moving on...

Developer Requirements

Yes, there are actually some things you should familiarize yourself with before starting to use CFWheels. Don't worry though. You don't need to be an expert on any on of them. A basic understanding is good enough.

• CFML. You should know CFML, the ColdFusion programming language. (Surprise!)

• Object Oriented Programming. You should grasp the concept of object oriented programming and how it applies to CFML.

• Model-View-Controller. You should know the theory behind the Model-View-Controller development pattern.

CFML

Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

This is a programming methodology that uses constructs called objects to design applications. Objects model real world entities in your application. OOP is based on several techniques including inheritance, modularity, polymorphism, and encapsulation. Most of these techniques are supported in CFML, making it a fairly functional object oriented language. At the most basic level, a .cfc file in CFML is a class, and you create an instance of a class by using the CreateObject function or the <cfobject> tag.

Trying to squeeze an explanation of object oriented programming and how it's used in CFML into a few sentences is impossible, and a detailed overview of it is outside the scope of this chapter. There is lots of high quality information online, so go ahead and Google it.

Model-View-Controller

Model-View-Controller, or MVC for short, is a way to structure your code so that it is broken down into 3 easy-to-manage pieces:

• Model. Just another name for the representation of data, usually a database table.

• View. What the user sees and interacts with (a web page in our case).

• Controller. The behind-the-scenes guy that's coordinating everything.

MVC is how CFWheels structures your code for you. As you start working with CFWheels applications, you'll see that most of the code you write is very nicely separated into one of these 3 categories.

System Requirements

CFWheels requires that you use one of these CFML engines:

Operating Systems

Your ColdFusion or Lucee engine can be installed on Windows, Mac, UNIX, or Linux—they all work just fine.

Web Servers

Database Engines

Finally, to build any kind of meaningful website application, you will likely interact with a database. These are the currently supported databases:

• SQL Server 7+

• MySQL 5+ *

• PostgreSQL 8.4+

• H2 1.4+

OK, hopefully this chapter didn't scare you too much. You can move on knowing that you have the basic knowledge needed, the software to run CFWheels, and a suitable project to start with.

CFWheels 2.x

CFWheels 1.x

CRUD series

"Building a Social Network"

Chris Peters adds data validation to the user registration form

Other

Generally speaking, upgrading CFWheels is as easy as replacing the wheels folder, especially for those small maintenance releases: however, there are usually exceptions in minor point releases (i.e, 1.1 to 1.3 required replacing other files outside the wheels folder). The notes below detail those changes.

Upgrading to 2.3.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.3.0 download.

Upgrading to 2.2.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.2.0 download.

Upgrading to 2.1.x

Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.1.0 download.

Code changes

• Rename any instances of findLast() to findLastOne()

Changes outside the wheels folder

• Create /events/onabort.cfm to support the onAbort method

Upgrading to 2.0.x

As always, the first step is to replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 2.0 download.

Other major changes required to upgrade your application are listed in the following sections.

Supported CFML Engines

CFWheels 2.0 requires one of these CFML engines:

• Lucee 4.5.5.006 + / 5.2.1.9+

• Adobe ColdFusion 10.0.23 / 11.0.12+ / 2016.0.4+

We've updated our minimum requirements to match officially supported versions from the vendors. (For example, Adobe discontinued support for ColdFusion 10 in May 2017, which causes it to be exposed to security exploits in the future. We've included it in 2.0 but it may be discontinued in a future version)

Changes outside the wheels folder

• The events/functions.cfm file has been moved to global/functions.cfm.

• The models/Model.cfc file should extend wheels.Model instead of Wheels (models/Wheels.cfc can be deleted).

• The controllers/Controller.cfc file should extend wheels.Controller instead of Wheels(controllers/Wheels.cfc can be deleted).

• The init function of controllers and models must be renamed to config.

• The global setting modelRequireInit has been renamed to modelRequireConfig.

• The global setting cacheControllerInitialization has been renamed to cacheControllerConfig.

• The global setting cacheModelInitialization has been renamed to cacheModelConfig.

• The global setting clearServerCache has been renamed to clearTemplateCache.

• The updateProperties() method has been removed, use update() instead.

• The renderPage function has been renamed to renderView

• includePartial() now requires the partial and query arguments to be set (if using a query)

Routing

By default, this is limited to GET requests for security reasons.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection

It is strongly recommended that you enable CFWheels 2.0's built-in CSRF protection.

For many applications, you need to follow these steps:

4. Update your route definitions to enforce HTTP verbs on actions that manipulate data (get, post, patch, delete, etc.)

5. Make sure that forms within the application are POSTing data to the actions that require post, patch, and delete verbs.

Database Migrations

If you have previously been using the dbmigrate plugin, you can now use the inbuilt version within the CFWheels 2 core.

Database Migration files in /db/migrate/ should now be moved to /migrator/migrations and extend wheels.migrator.Migration, not plugins.dbmigrate.Migration which can be changed with a simple find and replace. Note: Oracle is not currently supported for Migrator.

Upgrading to 1.4.x

1. Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.4 download.

2. Replace URL rewriting rule files – i.e, .htaccess, web.config, IsapiRewrite.ini

In addition, if you're upgrading from an earlier version of CFWheels, we recommend reviewing the instructions from earlier reference guides below.

Upgrading to 1.3.x

If you are upgrading from CFWheels 1.1.0 or newer, follow these steps:

1. Replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.3 download.

2. Replace the root root.cfm file with the new one from the 1.3 download.

3. Remove the <cfheader> calls from the following files:

   • events/onerror.cfm

   • events/onmaintenance.cfm

   • events/onmissingtemplate.cfm

In addition, if you're upgrading from an earlier version of CFWheels, we recommend reviewing the instructions from earlier reference guides below.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.1.x releases, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by each release in this cycle.

Upgrading to 1.1.x

If you are upgrading from Wheels 1.0 or newer, the easiest way to upgrade is to replace the wheels folder with the new one from the 1.1 download. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, we recommend reviewing the steps outlined in Upgrading to Wheels 1.0.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.1.x releases, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by each release in this cycle.

Plugin Compatibility

Be sure to review your plugins and their compatibility with your newly-updated version of Wheels. Some plugins may stop working, throw errors, or cause unexpected behavior in your application.

Supported System Changes

• 1.1: The minimum Adobe ColdFusion version required is now 8.0.1.

• 1.1: The minimum Railo version required is now 3.1.2.020.

• 1.1: The H2 database engine is now supported.

File System Changes

• 1.1: The .htaccess file has been changed. Be sure to copy over the new one from the new version 1.1 download and copy any addition changes that you may have also made to the original version.

Database Structure Changes

• 1.1: By default, Wheels 1.1 will wrap database queries in transactions. This requires that your database engine supports transactions. For MySQL in particular, you can convert your MyISAM tables to InnoDB to be compatible with this new functionality. Otherwise, to turn off automatic transactions, place a call to set(transactionMode="none").

• 1.1: Binary data types are now supported.

CFML Code Changes

Model Code

• 1.1: Validations will be applied to some model properties automatically. This may cause unintended behavior with your validations. To turn this setting off, call set(automaticValidations=false) in config/settings.cfm.

• 1.1: The class argument in hasOne(), hasMany(), and belongsTo() has been deprecated. Use the modelName argument instead.

• 1.1: afterFind() callbacks no longer require special logic to handle the setting of properties in objects and queries. (The "query way" works for both cases now.) Because arguments will always be passed in to the method, you can't rely on StructIsEmpty() to determine if you're dealing with an object or not. In the rare cases that you need to know, you can now call isInstance() or isClass() instead.

• 1.1: On create, a model will now set the updatedAt auto-timestamp to the same value as the createdAt timestamp. To override this behavior, call set(setUpdatedAtOnCreate=false) in config/settings.cfm.

View Code

• 1.1: Object form helpers (e.g. textField() and radioButton()) now automatically display a label based on the property name. If you left the label argument blank while using an earlier version of Wheels, some labels may start appearing automatically, leaving you with unintended results. To stop a label from appearing, use label=false instead.

• 1.1: The contentForLayout() helper to be used in your layout files has been deprecated. Use the includeContent() helper instead.

• 1.1: In production mode, query strings will automatically be added to the end of all asset URLs (which includes JavaScript includes, stylesheet links, and images). To turn off this setting, call set(assetQueryString=false) in config/settings.cfm.

• 1.1: stylesheetLinkTag() and javaScriptIncludeTag() now accept external URLs for the source/sources argument. If you manually typed out these tags in previous releases, you can now use these helpers instead.

• 1.1: flashMessages(), errorMessageOn(), and errorMessagesFor() now create camelCased class attributes instead (for example error-messages is now errorMessages). The same goes for the class attribute on the tag that wraps form elements with errors: it is now fieldWithErrors.

Controller Code

• 1.1.1: The if argument in all validation functions is now deprecated. Use the condition argument instead.

Upgrading to 1.0.x

Our listing of steps to take while upgrading your Wheels application from earlier versions to 1.0.x.

Upgrading from an earlier version of 1.x? Then the upgrade path is simple. All you need to do is replace the wheels folder with the new wheels folder from the download.

The easiest way to upgrade is to setup an empty website, deploy a fresh copy of Wheels 1.0, and then transfer your application code to it. When transferring, please make note of the following changes and make the appropriate changes to your code.

Note: To accompany the newest 1.0 release, we've highlighted the changes that are affected by that release.

Supported System Changes

• 1.0: URL rewriting with IIS 7 is now supported.

• 1.0: URL rewriting in a sub folder on Apache is now supported.

• ColdFusion 9 is now supported.

• Oracle 10g or later is now supported.

• PostgreSQL is now supported.

• Railo 3.1 is now supported.

File System Changes

• 1.0: There is now an app.cfm file in the config folder. Use it to set variables that you'd normally set in Application.cfc (i.e., this.name, this.sessionManagement, this.customTagPaths, etc.)

• 1.0: There is now a web.config file in the root.

• 1.0: There is now a Wheels.cfc file in the models folder.

• 1.0: The Wheels.cfc file in the controllers folder has been updated.

• 1.0: The IsapiRewrite4.ini and .htaccess files in the root have both been updated.

• The controller folder has been changed to controllers.

• The model folder has been changed to models.

• The view folder has been changed to views.

• Rename all of your CFCs in models and controllers to UpperCamelCase. So controller.cfc will become Controller.cfc, adminUser.cfc will become AdminUser.cfc, and so on.

• All images must now be stored in the images folder, files in the files folder, JavaScript files in the javascripts folder, and CSS files in the stylesheets folder off of the root.

Database Structure Changes

• deletedOn, updatedOn, and createdOn are no longer available as auto-generated fields. Please change the names to deletedAt, updatedAt, and createdAt instead to get similar functionality, and make sure that they are of type datetime, timestamp, or equivalent.

CFML Code Changes

Config Code

• 1.0: The action of the default route (home) has changed to wheels. The way configuration settings are done has changed quite a bit. To change a Wheels application setting, use the new set() function with the name of the Wheels property to change. (For example, <cfset set(dataSourceName="mydatasource")>.) To see a list of available Wheels settings, refer to the Configuration and Defaults chapter. Model Code

• 1.0: The extends attribute in models/Model.cfc should now be Wheels.

• findById() is now called findByKey(). Additionally, its id argument is now named key instead. For composite keys, this argument will accept a comma-delimited list.

• When using a model's findByKey() or findOne() functions, the found property is no longer available. Instead, the functions return false if the record was not found.

• A model's errorsOn() function now always returns an array, even if there are no errors on the field. When there are errors for the field, the array elements will contain a struct with name, fieldName, and message elements.

• The way callbacks are created has changed. There is now a method for each callback event ( beforeValidation(), beforeValidationOnCreate(), etc.) that should be called from your model's init() method. These methods take a single argument: the method within your model that should be invoked during the callback event. See the chapter on Object Callbacks for an example.

View Code

• 1.0: The contents of the views/wheels folder have been changed.

• The wrapLabel argument in form helpers is now replaced with labelPlacement. Valid values for labelPlacement are before, after, and around.

• The first argument for includePartial() has changed from name to partial. If you're referring to it through a named argument, you'll need to replace all instances with partial.

• The variable that keeps a counter of the current record when using includePartial() with a query has been renamed from currentRow to current.

• There is now an included wheels view folder in views. Be sure to copy that into your existing Wheels application if you're upgrading.

• The location of the default layout has changed. It is now stored at /views/layout.cfm. Now controller-specific layouts are stored in their respective view folder as layout.cfm. For example, a custom layout for www.domain.com/about would be stored at /views/about/layout.cfm.

• In linkTo(), the id argument is now called key. It now accepts a comma-delimited list in the case of composite keys.

• The linkTo() function also accepts an object for the key argument, in which case it will automatically extract the keys from it for use in the hyperlink.

• The linkTo() function can be used only for controller-, action-, and route-driven links now. * The url argument has been removed, so now all static links should be coded using a standard "a" tag.

Controller Code

URL/Routing

• The default route for Wheels has changed from [controller]/[action]/[id] to [controller]/[action]/[key]. This is to support composite keys. The params.id value will now only be available as params.key.

• You can now pass along composite keys in the URL. Delimit multiple keys with a comma. (If you want to use this feature, then you can't have a comma in the key value itself).

These are the top level commands in the wheels namespace.

wheels info

This command is the most basic of the commands and other than printing some pretty ASCII art it also displays the Current Working Directory, the CommandBox Module Root which can be handy when trying to diagnose version discrepancies, and lastly the CFWheels version currently installed. The version is determined from a variaty of sources. First and foremost, if there is a box.json file in the wheels/ directory the version is extracted from that box.json. Alternatively, if there is no box.json file in the wheels/ directory, we look in wheels/events/onapplicationstart.cfm and extract a version number from that file. That is the version number that is displayed on the default congratulations screen by the way. If both of these fail to get us a version number we can use, we ask you to let us know what version of wheels you are using and give you the option of generating a box.json file. This is handy for bringing old legacy installations under CLI control.

wheels init

This will attempt to bootstrap an EXISTING wheels app to work with the CLI.

We'll assume the database/datasource exists and the other config options like reloadpassword is all set up. If there's no box.json, create it, and ask for the version number if we can't determine it. If there's no server.json, create it, and ask for cfengine preferences. We'll ignore other templating objects for now, as this will probably be in place too.

wheels reload

This command will reload your CFWheels application. In order for this command to work, your local server needs to be started and running. This command basically issues a request to the running CFWheels application to reload as if you were doing it from your browsers address bar. You will be prompted for your reload password that will be passed to the reload endpoint.

wheels test

This command will call the Test Runner in a running server and return the results. The command can be run from within the directory of the running server or you can specify the server name to run against. Additionally you can specify the test suite to run, possible choices include the running application's test suite (app), the core framework test suite (core), or a particular plugin's test suite by passing in the plugin name.

wheels scaffold

This command will completely scaffold a new object. Typically you would run this command to stub out all the CRUD related files and then follow it up with a series of wheels g property commands to add the individual fields to the object. This command will:

• Create a model file

• A Default CRUD Controller complete with create/edit/update/delete code

• View files for all those actions

• Associated test stubs

• DB migration file

This command can be run without the server running except the database migration portion because that requires a running database. So if your server is already up and running you can run this command completely including the database migration portion. Afterwards make sure to run wheels reload to reload your application since we just made model changes. If the server isn't running, you can run this command and stub out all the files, then start your server with server start and finally migrate the database with wheels db latest.

wheels destroy

This command will destroy a given object. This is highly destructive, given the name, so proceed with caution. If you created an object using the wheels scaffold [objectName] command, this command is the inverse of that command and will remove all elements created by that command.

This command will destroy the following elements:

• the models definition file

• the controllers definition file

• the view sub folder and all it's contents

• the model test file

• the controller test file

• the views test file

• resource route configuration

After downloading and unzipping Wheels, here's the directory structure that you will see:

Quick Summary

Your configuration settings will be done in the config directory.

Your application code will end up in four of the folders, namely controllers, events, models, and views.

Static media files should be placed in the files, images, javascripts and stylesheets folders.

Place anything that need to be executed outside of the framework in the miscellaneous folder. The framework does not get involved when executing .cfm files in this folder. (The empty Application.cfc takes care of that.) Also, no URL rewriting will be performed in this folder, so it's a good fit for placing CFCs that need to be accessed remotely via <cfajaxproxy> and Flash AMF binding, for example.

Place Wheels plugins in the plugins folder.

And the last directory? That's the framework itself. It exists in the wheels directory. Please go in there and have a look around. If you find anything you can improve or new features that you want to add, let us know!

Detailed Overview

Let's go through all of the files and directories now starting with the ones you'll spend most of your time in: the code directories.

controllers

This is where you create your controllers. You'll see two files in here already: Controller.cfc and Wheels.cfc. You can place functions inside Controller.cfc to have that function shared between all the controllers you create. (This works because all your controllers will extend Controller.) Wheels.cfc is an internal file used by Wheels.

models

This is where you create your model files (or classes if you prefer that term). Each model file you create should map to one table in the database.

The setup in this directory is similar to the one for controllers, to share methods you can place them in the existing Model.cfc file.

views

This is where you prepare the views for your users. As you work on your website, you will create one view directory for each controller.

events

If you want code executed when ColdFusion triggers an event, you can place it here (rather than directly in Application.cfc).

config

Make all your configuration changes here. You can set the environment, routes, and other settings here. You can also override settings by making changes in the individual settings files that you see in the subdirectories.

files

Any files that you intend to deliver to the user using the sendFile() function should be placed here. Even if you don't use that function to deliver files, this folder can still serve as file storage if you like.

global

For application-wide globally accessible functions

images

This is a good place to put your images. It's not required to have them here, but all Wheels functions that involve images will, by convention, assume they are stored here.

javascripts

This is a good place to put your JavaScript files.

stylesheets

This is a good place to put your CSS files.

tests

This is where unit tests for your application should go

miscellaneous

Use this folder for code that you need to run completely outside of the framework. (There is an empty Application.cfc file in here, which will prevent Wheels from taking part in the execution.)

This is most useful if you're using Flash to connect directly to a CFC via AMF binding or if you're using <cfajaxproxy>in your views to bind directly to a CFC as well.

plugins

Place any plugins you have downloaded and want installed here.

migrator *

Database Migration CFC files and generated SQL files (This directory will only visible once you start using the migrator)

wheels

This is the framework itself. When a new version of Wheels is released it is often enough to just drop it in here (unless there has been changes to the general folder structure).

.htaccess

This file is used by Apache, and you specifically need it for URL rewriting to work properly. If you're not using Apache, then you can safely delete it. No longer included by default in 2.x

urlrewrite.xml

web.config

URL rewriting for version 7 of IIS. If you're not using IIS, then you can safely delete it. No longer included by default in 2.x

Application.cfc, index.cfm, root.cfm, and rewrite.cfm

These are all needed for the framework to run. No changes should be done to these files.

You can add more directories if you want to, of course. Just remember to include a blank Application.cfc in those directories. Otherwise, Wheels will try to get itself involved with those requests as well.

\

These are the commands in the wheels generate namespace. These commands are called by some of the top level commands but you can use them directly to speed up your development process.

wheels generate

The wheels generate command is what CommandBox calls a namespace and contains many sub commands beneath it. It's main purpose is to isolate those sub commands so there is no name collisions. It also has an alias of wheels g which allows you to shorten the commands you have to type. However, we have opted to show all the commands with their full names in the list below.

wheels generate app-wizard

Creates a new CFWheels application using our wizard to gather all the necessary information. This is the recommended route to start a new application.

This command will ask for:

• An Application Name (a new directory will be created with this name)

• Template to use

• A reload Password

• A datasource name

• What local cfengine you want to run

• If using Lucee, do you want to setup a local h2 dev database

• Do you want to initialize the app as a ForgeBox module

wheels new
wheels g app-wizard
wheels generate app-wizard

All these three commands are equivalent and will call the same wizard. The wizard in turn gathers all the required data and passes it all off to the wheels generate app command to do all the heavy lifting.

Let's take a look at the wizard pages after issuing the wheels new command:

You can accept the name offered or change it to whatever name you like. We try to clean up the name and take out special characters and spaces if we need to.

You can select a template to use. If you are reading this before CFWheels 2.4 is released you may want to select the Bleeding Edge Base Template.

The datasource is something you'll have to take care of unless you opt to use the H2 Embedded database in a Lucee server. Here you can define the datasource name if you would like to use something different than the application name.

In this step you can choose what CF Engine and version to launch. Lucee has an embedded SQL compliant database server called H2. So if you use one of the Lucee options you can specify to use the H2 database as well. Notice the last item allows you to specify the module slug or URI to a CF Engine not on the list.

On this step you are asked if you'd like to use the H2 Database, in which case we can set everything up for you, or if you would prefer to use another database engine and will take care of setting up the database yourself.

On this last step, you are asked if you want us to include a box.json file so you can eventually submit this to ForgeBox.io for sharing with he world.

This is the confirmation screen that shows all the choices you've made and gives you one last chance to bail out. If you choose to continue, the choices you've made will be sent over to the wheels g app command to do the actual app creation.

If you opted to continue you'll see a bunch of things scroll across your screen as the various items are downloaded and configured. Eventually you will see this status screen letting you know that everything was installed properly.

wheels generate app

Create a blank CFWheels app from one of our app templates or a template using a valid Endpoint ID which can come from ForgeBox, HTTP/S, git, github, etc.

By default an app named MyCFWheelsApp will be created in a sub directory called MyCFWheelsApp.

The most basic call...

wheels generate app

This can be shortened to...

wheels g app

Here are the basic templates that are available for you that come from ForgeBox

• CFWheels Base Template - Stable (default)

• CFWheels Base Template - Bleeding Edge

• CFWheels Template - HelloWorld

• CFWheels Template - HelloDynamic

• CFWheels Template - HelloPages

• CFWheels Example App

• CFWheels - TodoMVC - HTMX - Demo App

wheels create app template=base

The template parameter can also be any valid Endpoint ID, which includes a Git repo or HTTP URL pointing to a package. So you can use this to publish your own templates to use to start new projects.

wheels create app template=http://site.com/myCustomAppTemplate.zip

wheels generate route

Adds a default resources Route to the routes table. All the normal CRUD routes are automatically added.

wheels generate route [objectname]

wheels generate controller

I generate a controller in the controllers/ directory. You can either pass in a list of actions to stub out or the standard CRUD methods will be generated.

Create a user controller with full CRUD methods

wheels generate controller user

Create a user object with just "index" and "customaction" methods

wheels generate controller user index,customaction

wheels generate model

This command generates a model in the models/ folder and creates the associated DB Table using migrations.

Create "users" table and "User.cfc" in models:

wheels generate model user

Create just "User.cfc" in models:

wheels generate model user false

wheels generate property

This command generates a dbmigration file to add a property to an object and scaffold into _form.cfm and show.cfm if they exist (i.e, wheels generate property table columnName columnType).

Create the a string/textField property called firstname on the User model:

wheels generate property user firstname

Create a boolean/Checkbox property called isActive on the User model with a default of 0:

wheels generate property user isActive boolean

Create a boolean/Checkbox property called hasActivated on the User model with a default of 1 (i.e, true):

wheels generate property user isActive boolean 1

Create a datetime/datetimepicker property called lastloggedin on the User model:

wheels generate property user lastloggedin datetime

All columnType options: biginteger,binary,boolean,date,datetime,decimal,float,integer,string,limit,text,time,timestamp,uuid

wheels generate view

This command generates a view file in the views/ directory when specifying the object name and the action. If a directory for the object does not exist a subdirectory will be created in the views/ directory and the action NAME.cfm file place into it.

Create a default file called show.cfm without a template

wheels generate view user show

Create a default file called show.cfm using the default CRUD template

wheels generate view user show crud/show

wheels generate test

This command generates a test stub in /test/TYPE/NAME.cfc.

wheels generate test model user

wheels generate test controller users

wheels generate test view users edit

Repository

Anyone may fork the cfwheels repository, make changes, and submit a pull request.

Core Team Has Write Access

To make sure that we don't have too many chefs in the kitchen, we will be limiting direct commit access to a core team of developers.

At this time, the core team consists of these developers:

This does not restrict you from being able to contribute. See "Process for Implementing Code Changes" below for instructions on volunteering. With enough dedication, you can earn a seat on the core team as well!

Process for Implementing Code Changes

Here's the process that we'd like for you to follow. This process is in place mainly to encourage everyone to communicate openly. This gives us the opportunity to have a great peer-review process, which will result in quality. Who doesn't like quality?

2. A member of the core team will review your submission and leave feedback if necessary.

3. Once the core team member is satisfied with the scope of the issue, they will indicate so in a comment to the issue. This is your green light to start working. Get to coding, grasshopper!

5. When you have implemented your enhancement or change, use your Git repository to create a pull request with your changes.

   • You should annotate your commits with the issue number as #55 if the code issue is 55

6. A core team member will review it and post any necessary feedback in the issue tracker.

7. Once everything is resolved, a core team member will merge your commit into the Git repository.

Developing with Docker

Code Style

Additionally, we recommend that any applications written using the CFWheels framework follow the same style. This is optional, of course, but still strongly recommended.

Supported CFML Engines

All code for CFWheels should be written for use with both Adobe ColdFusion 2016 upwards, and Lucee 5 upwards.

Naming Conventions

To stay true to our ColdFusion and Java roots, all names must be camelCase. In some cases, such as internal CFML functions, the first letter should be capitalized as well. Refer to these examples.

CFC Conventions

Local Variables

Since moving to CFWheels 2.x, the old loc scope has now been deprecated and you should use the function local scope.

Code Example

CFC Methods

All CFC methods should be made public. If a method is meant for internal use only and shouldn't be included in the API, then prefix it with a dollar sign $. An example would be $query().

CFWheels was designed to be as lightweight as possible, so this keeps your options fairly open for developing AJAX features into your application.

For this tutorial, let's create the simplest example of all: a link that will render a message back to the user without refreshing the page.

A Simple Example

In this example, we'll wire up some simple JavaScript code that calls a CFWheels action asynchronously. All of this will be done with basic jQuery code and built-in CFWheels functionality.

First, let's make sure we've got an appropriate route setup. It might be you're still using the default wildcard() route which will create some default GET routes for the controller/action pattern, but we'll add a new route here just for practice:

Then, let's create a link to a controller's action in a view file, like so:

That piece of code by itself will work just like you expect it to. When you click the link, you will load the hello action inside the say controller.

With that code, we are listening to the click event of the hyperlink, which will make an asynchronous request to the hello action in the say controller. Additionally, the JavaScript call is passing a URL parameter called format set to json.

Note that the success block inserts keys from the response into the empty h1 and p blocks in the calling view. (You may have been wondering about those when you saw the first example. Mystery solved.)

Lastly, notice the lines where we're setting greeting["message"] and greeting["time"]. Due to the case-insensitive nature of ColdFusion, we recommend setting variables to be consumed by JavaScript using bracket notation like that. If you do not use that notation (i.e., greetings.message and greetings.time instead), your JavaScript will need to reference those keys from the JSON as MESSAGE and TIME (all caps). Unless you like turning caps lock on and off, you can see how that would get annoying after some time.

Assuming you already included jQuery in your application and you followed the code examples above, you now have a simple AJAX-powered web application built on Wheels. After clicking that Alert me! link, your say controller will respond back to you the serialized message via AJAX. jQuery will parse the JSON object and populate the h1 and pwith the appropriate data.

AJAX in CFWheels Explained

That is it! Hopefully now you have a clearer picture on how to create AJAX-based features for your web applications.

These are the commands in the wheels plugins namespace. Currently this section is pretty sparse, make suggestions of what you may want to see in this section.

wheels plugins list

This command will make a call to ForgeBox.io and bring back a list of available CFWheels Plugins listed on ForgeBox.

CFWheels allows you to set up different environments that match stages in your development cycle. That way you can configure different values that match what services to call and how your app behaves based on where you are in your development.

The Development environment is the most convenient one to use as you start building your application because it does not cache any data. Therefore, if you make any changes to your controllers and actions, for example, it will immediately be picked up by CFWheels.

Other environment modes cache this information in order to speed up your application as much as possible. Making changes to the database in these most modes will cause CFWheels to throw an error. (Although that can be avoided with a reload call. More on that later.)

The fastest environment mode in terms of page load time is the Production mode. This is what you should set your application to run in before you launch your website.

By default, all new applications will start in the Development environment which is middle-of-the-road in terms of convenience versus speed.

The 4 Environment Modes

Besides the 2 environments mentioned above, there are 2 more. Let's go through them all one by one so you can see the differences between them and choose the most appropriate one given your current stage of development.HTTP

Development

• Shows friendly CFWheels specific errors as well as regular ColdFusion errors on screen.

• Does not email you when an error is encountered.

• Caches controller and model initialization (the config() methods).

• Caches the database schema.

• Caches routes.

• Caches image information.

Production

• Caches everything that the Development mode caches.

• Activates all developer controlled caching (actions, pages, queries and partials).

• Shows your custom error page when an error is encountered.

• Shows your custom 404 page when a controller or action is not found.

• Sends an email to you when an error is encountered.

Testing

• Same caching settings as the Production mode but using the error handling of the Development mode. (Good for testing an application at its true speed while still getting errors reported on screen.)

Maintenance

• Shows your custom maintenance page unless the requesting IP address or user agent is in the exception list (set by calling set(ipExceptions="127.0.0.1") in config/settings.cfm or passed along in the URL as except=127.0.0.1, or as except=myuseragentstring to match against the user agent instead. Please note that if passing an exception on the URL using the except parameter, you must also provide the password parameter if a reload password has been define. This eliminates the possibility of a rouge actor breaking out of maintenance mode by simply adding an except to the URL.

This environment mode comes in handy when you want to briefly take your website offline to upload changes or modify databases on production servers.

How to Switch Modes

You change the current environment by modifying the config/environment.cfm file. After you've modified it, you need to either restart the ColdFusion service or issue a reload request. (See below for more info.)

The reload Request

Issuing a reload request is the easiest way to go from one environment to another. It's done by passing in reload as a parameter in the URL, like this:

This tells CFWheels to reload the entire framework (it will also run your code in the events/onapplicationstart.cfmfile), thus picking up any changes made in the config/environment.cfm file.

Lazy Reloading

There's also a shortcut for lazy developers who don't want to change this file at all. To use it, just issue the reload request like this instead:

This will make CFWheels skip your config/environment.cfm file and just use the URL value instead (testing, in this case).

Password-Protected Reloads

For added protection, you can set the reloadPassword variable in config/settings.cfm. When set, a reload request will only be honored when the correct password is also supplied, like this:

Disabling Environment Switching

If you're deploying to a container based environment, or one that you know you'll never want to switch out of production mode, you can disable URL based environment switching completely via: set(allowEnvironmentSwitchViaUrl = false);

This is just an additional check to ensure that your production mode acts in the way you expect! Application reloading is still allowed, but the configuration can not be altered.\

There is a specific set of standards that CFWheels follows when you run it in its default state. This is to save you time. With conventions in place, you can get started coding without worrying about configuring every little detail.

But it is important for you to know these conventions, especially if you're running an operating system and/or DBMS configuration that's picky about things like case sensitivity.

URLs

CFWheels uses a very flexible routing system to match your application's URLs to controllers, views, and parameters.

Within this routing system is a default route that handles many scenarios that you'll run across as a developer. The default route is mapped using the pattern [controller]/[action]/[key].

Consider this example URL:http://localhost/users/edit/12

This maps to the Users controller, edit action, and a key of 12. For all intents and purposes, this will load a view for editing a user with a primary key value in the database of 12.

This URL pattern works up the chain and will also handle the following example URLs:

Naming Conventions for Controllers, Actions, and Views

Controllers, actions, and views are closely linked together by default. And how you name them will influence the URLs that CFWheels will generate.

Controllers

First, a controller is a CFC file placed in the controllers folder. It should be named in PascalCase. For example, a site map controller would be stored at controllers/SiteMap.cfc.

Multi-word controllers will be delimited by hyphens in their calling URLs. For example, a URL of /site-map will reference the SiteMap controller.

Actions

Methods within the controllers, known as actions, should be named in camelCase.

Like with controllers, any time a capital letter is used in camelCase, a hyphen will be used as a word delimiter in the corresponding URL. For example, a URL of /site-map/search-engines will reference the searchEngines action in the SiteMap controller.

Views

By default, view files are named after the action names and are stored in folders that correspond to controller names. Both the folder names and view file names should be all lowercase, and there is no word delimiter.

In our /site-map/search-engines URL example, the corresponding view file would be stored at views/sitemap/searchengines.cfm.

Layouts

A special type of view file called a layout defines markup that should surround the views loaded by the application. The default layout is stored at views/layout.cfm and is automatically used by all views in the application.

Controller-level layouts can also be set automatically by creating a file called layout.cfm and storing it in the given controller's view folder. For example, to create a layout for the users controller, the file would be stored at views/users/layout.cfm.

When a controller-level layout is present, it overrides the default layout stored in the root views folder.

Naming Conventions for Models and Databases

By default, the names of CFWheels models, model properties, database tables, and database fields all relate to each other. CFWheels even sets a sensible default for the CFML data source used for database interactions.

Data Sources

CFWheels will automatically look for a data source with the same name as the folder that your application is deployed in. If your CFWheels application is in a folder called blog, CFWheels will look for a data source called blog, for example.

Plural Database Table Names, Singular Model Names

CFWheels adopts a Rails-style naming conventions for database tables and model files. Think of a database table as a collection of model objects; therefore, it is named with a plural name. Think of a model object as a representation of a single record from the database table; therefore, it is named with a singular word.

For example, a user model represents a record from the users database table. CFWheels also recognizes plural patterns like binary/binaries, mouse/mice, child/children, etc.

Like controller files, models are also CFCs and are named in PascalCase. They are stored in the models folder. So the user model would be stored at models/User.cfc.

Everything in the Database Is Lowercase

In your database, both table names and column names should be lowercase. The customersegments table could have fields called title, regionid, and incomelevel, for example.

Because of CFML's case insensitive nature, we recommend that you refer to model names and corresponding properties in camelCase. This makes for easier readability in your application code.

In the customersegments example above, you could refer to the properties in your CFML as title, regionId, and incomeLevel to stick to CFML's Java-style roots. (Built-in CFML functions are often written in camelCase and PascalCase, after all.)

Configuration and Defaults

There are many default values and settings that you can tweak in CFWheels when you need to. Some of them are conventions and others are just configurations available for you to change. You can even change argument defaults for built-in CFWheels functions to keep your code DRYer.

We all love the "Convention over Configuration" motto of CFWheels, but what about those two cases that pop into everyone's head? What if I want to develop in my own way? Or, What about an existing application that I need to port into CFWheels? Gladly, that's what configuration and defaults are there for. Let's take a look at exactly how this is performed.

Where Configurations Happen

You will find configuration files in the config folder of your CFWheels application. In general, most of your settings will go in config/settings.cfm.

How to Set Configurations

How to Access Configuration Values

Setting CFML Application Configurations

In CFML's standard Application.cfc, you can normally set values for your application's properties in the thisscope. CFWheels still provides these options to you in the file at config/app.cfm.

Here is an example of what can go in config/app.cfm:

Types of Configurations Available

There are several types of configurations that you can perform in CFWheels to override all those default behaviors. In CFWheels, you can find all these configuration options:

Let's take a closer look at each of these options.

Environment Settings

Not only are the environments useful for separating your production settings from your "under development" settings, but they are also opportunities for you to override settings that will only take effect in a specified environment.

The setting for the current environment can be found in config/environment.cfm and should look something like this:

Full Listing of Environment Settings

URL Rewriting Settings

Sometimes it is useful for our applications to "force" URL rewriting. By default, CFWheels will try to determinate what type of URL rewriting to perform and set it up for you. But you can force in or out this setting by using the example below:

The code above will tell CFWheels to skip its automatic detection of the URL Rewriting capabilities and just set it as "Off".

You can also set it to "Partial" if you believe that your web server is capable of rewriting the URL as folders after index.cfm.

Data Source Settings

Probably the most important configuration of them all. What is an application without a database to store all of its precious data?

The data source configuration is what tells CFWheels which database to use for all of its models. (This can be overridden on a per-model basis, but that will be covered later.) To set this up in CFWheels, it's just as easy as the previous example:

Function Settings

OK, here it's where the fun begins! CFWheels includes a lot of functions to make your life as a CFML developer easier. A lot of those functions have sensible default argument values to minimize the amount of code that you need to write. And yes, you guessed it, CFWheels lets you override those default argument values application-wide.

Let's look at a little of example:

Debugging and Error Settings

You'll generally want to configure how CFWheels handles errors and debugging information based on your environment. For example, you probably won't want to expose CFML errors in your production environment, whereas you would want to see those errors in your development environment.

For example, let's say that we want to enable debugging information in our "development" environment temporarily:

Full Listing of Debugging and Error Settings

Caching Settings

CFWheels does a pretty good job at caching the framework and its output to speed up your application. But if personalization is key in your application, finer control over caching settings will become more important.

Let's say your application generates dynamic routes and you need it to check the routes on each request. This task will be as simple as this line of code:

Full Listing of Caching Settings

ORM Settings

The CFWheels ORM provides many sensible conventions and defaults, but sometimes your data structure requires different column naming or behavior than what CFWheels expects out of the box. Use these settings to change those naming conventions or behaviors across your entire application.

For example, if we wanted to prefix all of the database table names in our application with blog_ but didn't want to include that at the beginning of model names, we would do this:

Now your post model will map to the blog_posts table, comment model will map to the blog_comments table, etc.

Full Listing of ORM Settings

Plugin Settings

There are several settings that make plugin development more convenient. We recommend only changing these settings in development mode so there aren't any deployment issues in production, testing, and maintenancemodes. (At that point, your plugin should be properly packaged in a zip file.)

If you want to keep what's stored in a plugin's zip file from overwriting changes that you made in its expanded folder, set this in config/development/settings.cfm:

Media Settings

Full Listing of Asset Settings

Routing Settings

CFWheels includes a powerful routing system. Parts of it are configurable with the following settings.

Full Listing of Miscellaneous Settings

View Helper Settings

CFWheels has a multitude of view helpers for building links, forms, form elements, and more. Use these settings to configure global defaults for their behavior.

CSRF Protection Settings

CFWheels includes built-in Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection for form posts. Part of the CSRF protection involves storing an authenticity token in the session (default) or within an encrypted cookie. Most of the settings below are for when you've chosen to store the authenticity token within a cookie instead of the server's session store.

CORS Protection Settings

CFWheels includes built-in Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) which allows you to configure which cross-origin requests and methods are allowed. By default, this feature is turned off which will deny cross origin requests at the browser level.

In this first version, the user can enable this feature, which will allow requests from all origins and all methods.

Miscellaneous Settings

Migrator Configuration Settings

These are the commands in the wheels dbmigrate namespace. They allow you to manipulate the database structure and script the changes. This makes is easy to share your changes with coworkers, check them into source control, or apply them automatically when you deploy your code to production.

wheels dbmigrate

This is another namespace with sub commands within it. It also has an alias of wheels db which allows you to shorten the command you need to type.

wheels dbmigrate info

This command doesn't take any inputs but simply tries to communicate with the running server and gather information about your migrations and displays them in a table.

From the information presented in the two tables you can see how many migration files are in your application and of those how many have already been applied and available to be applied. You are also presented with the datasource name and database type information.

wheels dbmigrate latest

This command will migrate the database to the latest version. This command will apply each migration file from the current state all the way to the latest one at a time. If a SQL error is encountered in one of the files, the command will stop at that point and report the error.

wheels dbmigrate reset

This command will migrate the database to version 0 effectively resetting the database to nothing.

wheels dbmigrate up

This command will process the next migration file from the current state. If the database is already at the latest version this command will have no effect.

wheels dbmigrate down

This command will reverse the current migration file and take the database one step backwards. If the database is already at version 0 then this command will have no effect.

wheels dbmigrate exec

This command will run a particular migration file and take the database to that version. The four directional migration commands above latest, reset, up, and down each in turn call this command to process their intended action.

wheels dbmigrate create table

This command will generate a new migration file for creating a table in the database. Keep in mind you will still have to run the migration file but this will add it to the migration history.

wheels dbmigrate create column

This command will generate a new migration file for adding a new column to an existing table.

wheels dbmigrate create blank

wheels dbmigrate remove table

This command generates a migration file to remove a table. The migration file is will still need to be run individual but this command gets the migration generated and into the history.

Sending files?! Is that really a necessary feature of CFWheels? Can't I just place the file on my web server and link to it? You are correct, there is absolutely no need to use CFWheels to send files. Your web server will do a fine job of sending out files to your users.

Sending Files with the sendFile() Function

The convention in CFWheels is to place all files you want users to be able to download in the files folder.

Assuming you've placed a file named wheels_tutorial_20081028_J657D6HX.pdf in that folder, here is a quick example of how you can deliver that file to the user. Let's start with creating a link to the action that will handle the sending of the file first.

Here's the sendTutorial action:

That's one ugly file name though, eh? Let's present it to the user in a nicer way by suggesting a different name to the browser:

Much better! :)

Here's an example:

Example

Sending Files via ram://

You can even send files which are stored in ram:// - this is particularly useful when you're dynamically creating files (such as PDF reports) which don't need to be written to the file system.

Securing Access to Files

However, there is a security flaw here. Can you figure out what it is?

You may have guessed that the files folder is placed in your web root, so anyone can download files from it by typing http://www.domain.com/files/wheels_tutorial_20081028_J657D6HX.pdf in their browser. Although users would need to guess the file names to be able to access the files, we would still need something more robust as far as security goes.

There are two solutions to this.

The easiest one is to just lock down access to the folder using your web server. CFWheels won't be affected by it since it gets the file from the file system.

This assumes you've moved the folder two levels up in your file system and into a folder named "tutorials".

Don't Open Any Holes with URL Parameters

When a user submits a form, you do not want to show any content on the page that handles the form submission! Why? Because if you do, and the user hits refresh in their browser, the form handling code could be triggered again, possibly causing duplicate entries in your database, multiple emails being sent, etc.

Remember to Redirect

Three Ways to Redirect

Let's look at the three ways you can redirect in CFWheels.

1. Redirecting to Another Action

2. Redirection Using Routes

3. Redirecting to the Referring URL

Handling an Invalid Referrer

The referring URL is retrieved from the cgi.http_referer value. If this value is blank or comes from a different domain than the current one, CFWheels will redirect the visitor to the root of your website instead.

Appending Params

Sometimes it's useful to be able to send the visitor back to the same URL they came from but with extra parameters added to it. You can do this by using the params argument. Note that CFWheels will append to the URL and not replace it in this case.

The addToken and statusCode Arguments

You can also set the type of redirect to something other than the default 302 redirect, by passing in statusCode=3xx. For example, 301 indicates a permanent redirect.

One of a developer’s biggest time sinks is coming up with and writing accurate and engaging documentation. Even if it’s an internal project with.. well, just you… it’s still incredibly valuable to have: coming back to projects a few months or even years later can often lead to a bit of head scratching and screams of “why?”, especially with your own code.

Whilst we’re not promising that CFWheels will write all your documentation for you, we have put some tools in place to hopefully make the process a little less painful. With a small amount of adjustment in how you document your core functions, documentation doesn’t necessarily have to be such a time consuming process.

In the CFWheels core, we've adopted javadoc-style syntax (with a few twists of our own) to automatically create our main documentation, and there's nothing stopping you adding to this core set of documentation for your own app. It just needs a bit of markup.

Browse the Core API

The first thing to notice is the new ‘[View Docs]’ link in the debug section in the footer: Following that link leads you to the main internal documentation.

The three column layout is designed to allow for quick filtering by section or function name. On the left are the main CFWheels core categories, such as Controller and Model functions, which are then broken down into sub categories, such as Flash and Pagination functions etc. Clicking on a link in the first column will filter the list in the second and third columns with all the functions which match (including child functions of that category).

Filtering by function name is made simple by a “Filter as you type” search field in the second column, so getting to the right function should be very quick.

The third column contains the main function definition, including tags, parameters and code samples.

How is it generated?

Each function in the core is now appropriately marked up with javaDoc style comments. This, combined with getMetaData() allows us to parse the markup into something useful.

Example Core Function

The [section] and [category] tags categorise the function as appropriate, and the @html part describes the function’s parameter. The additional parameter data, such as whether it’s required, type and any defaults are automatically parsed too. This results in a display like:

Documenting your own functions

Any function which is available to Controller.cfc or Model.cfc is automatically included; if there’s no javaDoc comment, then they’ll appear in uncategorized. But of course, there’s nothing stopping you creating your own [section] and [category] tags, which will then automatically appear on the left hand column for filtering: you’re not restricted to what we’ve used in the core.

As an example, if you wanted to document all your filters, you might want to have a [section: Application] tag, with [category: filters]. This way, your application documentation grows as you create it.

Something as simple as a sublime text snippet for a new function which includes the basic javaDoc skeleton can get you in the habit pretty quickly!

Plugins too!

We also introspect plugins for the same markup. We encourage plugin authors to adjust their plugin code to include [section: Plugins] at the very least.

Exports & Re-use

You can export the docs via JSON just by changing the URL string: i.e ?controller=wheels&action=wheels&view=docs&type=core&format=json

You could also include the functions used to create the docs and create your own version (perhaps useful for a CMS or other application where you have internal documentation for authenticated users). Whilst this isn’t officially supported (the main functions may be subject to change!) it is technically possible. The best example is the thing itself – see the main output if you’re interested. Please note that the user interface isn’t available in production mode (for obvious reasons we hope!), so if you wanted to expose this data to an end user, you would probably need to “roll your own” with this approach.

Updating

Note that the CFC introspection doesn’t automatically happen on every request, so you will need to ?reload=true to see changes to your code. Additionally, Adobe ColdFusion is more aggressive in caching CFC metadata, so depending on your settings, you may not see changes until a server restart.

Code samples

Whilst the core has additional code samples which can be loaded from text files, there’s no support for your application functions to take advantage of this yet.

Roadmap

Whilst this API/function explorer is a great first step, you’ll notice your controller and model specific functions aren’t included (only those shared amongst controllers, or in the /global/functions.cfm file. This is because we’re only looking at the main Model.cfc and Controller.cfc and what it can access.

In CFWheels 2.1, we’ll look at adding a full Controller and Model metadata explorer using the same techniques, and map functions like show() to their respective routes too.

A big part of a controller's task is to respond to the user. In Wheels you can respond to the user in three different ways:

• Displaying content

• Redirecting to another URL

• Sending a file

Rendering a Page

Rendering a Partial

Rendering Nothing at All

Rendering Text

Rendering to a Variable

Normally when you call any of the rendering functions, the result is stored inside an internal Wheels variable. This value is then outputted to the browser at the end of the request.

Caching the Response

Using a Layout

Wheels is quite simple when it comes to figuring out how incoming requests map to code in your application. Let's look at a URL for an e-commerce website and dissect it a little.

But before we do that, a quick introduction to URLs in Wheels is in order.

A Wheels URL

URLs in Wheels generally look something like this:

It's also possible that the URLs will look like this in your application:

This happens when your web server does not support the cgi.path_info variable.

Regardless of your specific setup, Wheels will try to figure out how to handle the URLs. If Wheels fails to do this properly (i.e. you know that your web server supports cgi.path_info, but Wheels insists on creating the URLs with the query string format), you can override it by setting URLRewriting in config/settings.cfm to either On, Partial, or Off. The line of code should look something like this:

"Partial URL Rewriting" is what we call that first URL up there with the /index.cfm/ format.

In the example URLs used above, shop is the name of the controller to call, and products is the name of the action to call on that controller.

Model-View-Controller Explained

Unless you're familiar with the Model-View-Controller pattern, you're probably wondering what controllers and actions are.

Put very simply, a controller takes an incoming request and, based on the parameters in the URL, decides what (if any) data to get from the model (which in most cases means your database), and decides which view (which in most cases means a CFML file producing HTML output) to display to the user.

An action is an entire process of executing code in the controller, including a view file and rendering the result to the browser. As you will see in the example below, an action usually maps directly to one specific function with the same name in the controller file.

Creating URLs

For the remainder of this chapter, we'll type out the URLs in this shorter and prettier way.

A Wheels Page

Let's look a little closer at what happens when Wheels receives this example incoming request.

First, it will create an instance of the shop controller (controllers/Shop.cfc) and call the function inside it named products.

Let's show how the code for the products function could look to make it more clear what goes on:

Wheels Conventions

Because Wheels favors convention over configuration, we can remove a lot of the code in the example above, and it will still work because Wheels will just guess what your intention is. Let's have a quick look at exactly what code can be removed and why.

Therefore, the code above can be changed to:

… and it will still work just fine.

That leaves you with this code:

That looks rather silly, a products function with no code whatsoever. What do you think will happen if you just remove that entire function, leaving you with this code?

…If you guessed that Wheels will just assume you don't need any code for the products action and just want the view rendered directly, then you are correct.

In fact, if you have a completely blank controller like the one above, you can delete it from the file system altogether!

This is quite useful when you're just adding simple pages to a website and you don't need the controller and model to be involved at all. For example, you can create a file named about.cfm in the views/home folder and access it at http://localhost/home/about without having to create a specific controller and/or action for it, assuming you're still using wildcard routing.

This also highlights the fact that Wheels is a very easy framework to get started in because you can basically program just as you normally would by creating simple pages like this and then gradually "Wheelsifying" your code as you learn the framework.

The params Struct

Besides making sure the correct code is executed, Wheels also does something else to simplify request handling for you. It combines the url and form scopes into one. This is something that most CFML frameworks do as well. In Wheels, it is done in the params struct.

The params struct is available to you in the controller and view files but not in the model files. (It's considered a best practice to not mix your request handling with your business logic.) Besides the form and url scope variables, the params struct also contains the current controller and action name for easy reference.

If the same variable exists in both the url and form scopes, the value in the form scope will take precedence.

To make this concept easier to grasp, imagine a login form on your website that submits to http://localhost/account/login?sendTo=dashboard with the variables username and password present in the form. Your params struct would look like this:

Now instead of accessing the variables as url.sendTo, form.username, etc., you can just use the params struct for all of them instead.

JSON as part of the request body

If you're constructing a JSON API, you're inevitably going to come across how to deal with "incoming" json packets to your routing endpoints. Instead of having to test each request with whether it's valid json etc, CFWheels will automatically map the JSON body in a request to the params struct, as long as it has application/json as it's mime type.

So in the same way that the url and form scopes are merged, so a valid json body would be. The exception to the rule is when a javascript array is the root element, where it's then added to params._json to follow Rails conventions. (For obvious reasons, we can't merge an array into a struct!)

Routing

Why Test?

At some point, your code is going to break. Upgrades, feature enhancements, and bug fixes are all part of the development lifecycle. Quite often with deadlines, you don't have the time to test the functionality of your entire application with every change you make.

The problem is that today's fix could be tomorrow's bug. What if there were an automated way of checking if that change you're making is going to break something? That's where writing tests for your application can be invaluable.

The Test Framework

Like everything else in CFWheels, the testing framework is very simple, yet powerful. You don't need to remember a hundred different functions because CFWheels' testing framework contains only a handful.

Conventions

In order to run tests against your application, all tests must reside in the tests directory off the root of your CFWheels application, or within a subdirectory thereof.

When you run the tests for your application, CFWheels recursively scans your application's tests directory for valid tests. Whilst you have freedom to organize your subdirectories, tests and supporting files any way you see fit, we would recommend using the directory structure below as a guide:

Any components that will contain tests must extend the wheels.Test component:

If the testing framework sees that a component does not extend wheels.Test, that component will be skipped. This lets you create and store any mock components that you might want to use with your tests and keep everything together.

Any test methods must begin their name with "test":

If a method does not begin with test, it is ignored and skipped. This lets you create as many helper methods for your testing components as you want.

Do not var-scope any variables used in your tests. In order for the testing framework to access the variables within the tests that you're writing, all variables need to be within the component's variables scope. The easy way to do this is to just not var variables within your tests, and your CFML engine will automatically assign these variables into the variables scope of the component for you. You'll see this in the examples below.

Setup & Teardown

When writing a group of tests, it's common for there to be some duplicate code, global configuration, and/or cleanup needs that need to be run before or after each test. In order to keep things DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), the testing framework offers 2 special methods that you can optionally use to handle such configuration.

setup(): Used to initialize or override any variables or execute any code that needs to be run before each test.

teardown(): Used to clean up any variables or execute any code that needs to be ran after each test.

Example:

Evaluation

assert(): This is the main method that you will be using when developing tests. To use, all you have to do is provide a quoted expression. The power of this is that ANY 'truthy' expression can be used.

An example test that checks that two values equal each other:

An example test that checks that the first value is less then the second value:

You get the idea since you've used these kinds of expressions a thousand times. If you think of the assert()command as another way of using evaluate(), it will all make sense. Remember that you can use any expression that evaluates to a boolean value, so if you can write assertions against structures, arrays, objects, you name it, you can test it!

An example test that checks that a key exists in a structure:

raised(): Used when you want to test that an exception will be thrown. raised() will raise and catch the exception and return to you the exception type (think cfcatch.type). Just like assert(), raised() takes a quoted expression as its argument.

An example of raising the Wheels.TableNotFound error when you specify an invalid model name:

Debugging

debug(): Will display its output after the test result so you can examine an expression more closely.

expression (string) - a quoted expression to display display (boolean) - whether or not to display the output

Testing Your Models

The first part of your application that you are going to want to test against are your models because this is where all the business logic of your application lives. Suppose that we have the following model:

As you can see from the code above, our model has a beforeSave callback that runs whenever we save a user object. Let's get started writing some tests against this model to make sure that our callback works properly.

First, create a test component called /tests/models/TestUserModel.cfc, and in the setup function, create an instance of the model that we can use in each test that we write. We will also create a structure containing some default properties for the model.

As you can see, we invoke our model by using the model() method just like you would normally do in your controllers.

The first thing we do is add a simple test to make sure that our custom model validation works.

Now that we have tests to make sure that our model validations work, it's time to make sure that the callback works as expected when a valid model is created.

Testing Your Controllers

The next part of our application that we need to test is our controller. Below is what a typical controller for our user model would contain for creating and displaying a list of users:

Notice the return in the create action in the redirectTo() method? The reason for this is quite simple, under the covers, when you call redirectTo(), CFWheels is using cflocation. As we all know, there is no way to intercept or stop a cflocation from happening. This can cause quite a number of problems when testing out a controller because you would never be able to get back any information about the redirection.

To work around this, the CFWheels test framework will "delay" the execution of a redirect until after the controller has finished processing. This allows CFWheels to gather and present some information to you about what redirection will occur.

The drawback to this technique is that the controller will continue processing and as such we need to explicitly exit out of the controller action on our own, thus the reason why we use return.

Let's create a test package called /tests/controllers/TestUsersController.cfc to test that the create action works as expected:

Notice that a lot more goes into testing a controller than a model. The first step is setting up the params that will need to be passed to the controller. We then pass the 'params' to the processRequest() function which returns a structure containing a bunch of useful information.

We use this information to make sure that the controller redirected the visitor to the index action once the action was completed.

Note: processRequest() is only for use within the test framework.

Below are some examples of how a controller can be tested:

Testing Controller Variables

If you want to test a variable that's being set on a controller you can make use of the this scope. This way it's available from outside the controller, which makes it testable.

If you think that's too "ugly", you can instead make a public function on the controller that returns the value and then call that from your tests.

Testing Partials

You may at some point want to test a partial (usually called via includePartial()) outside of a request. You'll notice that if you just try and call includePartial() from within the test suite, it won't work. Thankfully there's a fairly easy technique you can use by calling a "fake" or "dummy" controller.

Testing Your Views

Next we will look at testing the view layer. Below is the code for new.cfm, which is the view file for the controller's new action:

Testing the view layer is very similar to testing controllers, we will setup a params structure to pass to the processRequest() function which will return (among other things) the generated view output.

Once we have this output, we can then search through it to make sure that whatever we wanted the view to display is presented to our visitor. In the test below, we are simply checking for the heading.

Testing Your Application Helpers

Next up is testing global helper functions. Below is a simple function that removes spaces from a string.

Testing these helpers is fairly straightforward. All we need to do is compare the function's return value against a value that we expect, using the assert() function.

Testing Your View Helpers

Testing your view helpers are very similar to testing application helpers except we need to explicitly include the helpers in the setup() function so our view functions are available to the test framework.

Below is a simple function that returns a string wrapped in h1 tags.

And in our view test package:

Testing Plugins

Testing plugins requires slightly different approaches depending on the mixin attribute defined in the plugin's main component.

Below is a simple plugin called timeAgo that extends CFWheels' timeAgoInWords view helper by appending "ago" to the function's return value. Take note of the mixin="controller" argument as this will play a part in how we test the plugin.

In order to test our plugin, we'll need to do a little setup. Our plugin's tests will reside in a directory within our plugin package named tests. We'll also need a directory to keep test assets, in this case a dummy controller that we will need to instantiate in out test's setup() function.

The /plugins/timeago/tests/assets/controllers/Dummy.cfc controller contains the bare minimum for a controller.

Firstly, in our /plugins/timeago/tests/TestTimeAgo.cfc we'll need to copy the application scope so that we can change some of CFWheels' internal paths. Fear not, we'll reinstate any changes after the tests have finished executing using the teardown function. so that if you're running your tests on your local development machine, your application will continue to function as expected after you're done testing.

Once the setup is done, we simply execute the plugin functions and assert that the return values are what we expect.

If your plugin is uses mixin="model", you will need to create and instantiate a dummy model component.

Running Your Tests

Down in the debug area of your CFWheels application (that grey area at the bottom of the page), you will notice a some links for running tests for the following areas:

Run Tests Runs all tests that you have created for your application. You should run these tests before deploying your application.

View Tests Shows a list of all your test packages with links to run individual packages or single tests.

Framework Tests If you have cloned the CFWheels repository, you will also see a link to run the core framework unit tests.

Plugin Tests If a plugin has a /tests directory, you will also see a link to run the plugin's tests.

The test URL will look something like this: /index.cfm?controller=wheels&action=wheels&view=tests&type=app

Running an individual package: /index.cfm?controller=wheels&action=wheels&view=tests&type=app&package=controllers

Running a single test: /index.cfm?controller=wheels&action=wheels&view=tests&type=app&package=controllers&test=testCaseOne

These URLs are useful should you want an external system to run your tests.

Test Resuts Format

CFWheels can return your test results in either HTML, JUnit or JSON formats, simply by using the format url parameter. Eg: format=junit

Additional Techniques

Once you're comfortable with the concepts thus far, there are a few more functions available which can be used to modify the behavior of your test suite.

beforeAll() - Runs once before the test suite has run. Here is where you might populate a test database or set suite-specific application variables*.

afterAll() - Runs once after the test suite has finished.

packageSetup() - Used in a test package, similar to setup() but only runs once before a package's first test case. Here is where you might set variables that are common to all the tests in a CFC.

packageTeardown() - Used in a test package, similar to teardown() but only runs once after a package's last test case. Here is where you might cleanup files, database rows created by test cases or revert application variables in a CFC.

A typical test request lifecycle will look something like this:

Test.cfc -beforeAll()

Foo.cfc - packageSetup() Foo.cfc - setup() Foo.cfc - testCaseOne() Foo.cfc - teardown() Foo.cfc - setup() Foo.cfc - testCaseTwo() Foo.cfc - teardown() Foo.cfc - packageTeardown()

Bar.cfc - packageSetup() Bar.cfc - setup() Bar.cfc - testCaseThree() Bar.cfc - teardown() Bar.cfc - packageTeardown()

Test.cfc - afterAll()

In order to use beforeAll() and afterAll(), you'll need to make a few small changes to your test suite. Firstly, create a Test.cfc in the root of your /tests/ directory. This is where you'll define your beforeAll() and afterAll() functions and it should look something like this:

For your test packages to inherit these functions, you'll need to change the extends attribute in your test packages to extends="tests.Test". This enables the CFWheels test framework to run your functions.

Since we've implemented the new Test.cfc component, we now have global setup() and teardown() functions will run respectively before and after every test case. If we want to prevent these from running in a particular package, we simply override the global functions like this:

If we want to run the global function AND some package-specific setup & teardown code, here's how achieve that:

Whilst best practice recommends that tests should be kept as simple and readable as possible, sometimes moving commonly used code into test suite helpers can greatly improve the simplicity of your tests.

Some examples may include, serializing complex values for use in assert() or grouping multiple assertions together. Whatever your requirements, there are a number of ways to use test helpers.

1. Put your helper functions in your /tests/Test.cfc. These will be available to any package that extends this component. Be mindful of functions you put in here, as it's easy to create naming collisions.

2. If you've arranged your tests into subdirectories, you can create a helpers.cfm file in any given directory and simply include it in the package.

3. Put package-specific helper functions in the same package as the tests that use it. These will only be available to the tests in that package. To ensure that these test helpers are not run as tests, use a function name that doesn't start with "test_". Eg: $simplify()

• Overloading application vars.. CFWheels will revert the application scope after all tests have completed.

Caveat: The test suite request must complete without uncaught exceptions. If an uncaught exception occurs, the application scope may stay 'dirty', so it's recommended to reload the application by adding reload=true param to your url whilst developing your test packages.

Learn By Example: CFWheels Core